Assessment & Feedback

Assessment plays a vital role in HE and shapes the experience and behaviour of students. Assessment should be designed to promote student learning over the course of the programme, not just in the weeks leading to the assessment.

Whilst assessment is designed at module level, it should be coordinated at programme level to ensure it builds up progressively through the programme to meet the programme learning outcomes.

Feedback is an essential element within the learning process, enabling students to identify how they can improve. Again, whilst feedback will be provided at a module level, consideration should be given how students will be able to use it to feed-forward into future assessments.

Resources

The university academic regulations can be found on StaffNet. This includes links to level descriptors and grade descriptors.

The project focused on programme level assessment, and aimed to redress the current imbalance where assessment issues are primarily investigated and discussed at module/unit level by providing evidence-based guidance and exemplars/examples to help programme leaders develop and implement effective programme focused assessment strategies. The project website contains case studies and various resources exploring programme focused assessment.

This resource provides information about different types of assessment, including the levels at which a task might be most successful and how to avoid plagiarism.

– A Marked Improvement: transforming assessment in HE, assessment review tool, HEA, 2012
This resource has been developed to provide a strong rationale for transforming assessment in HE. The report includes an assessment review tool, offering a practical method to take stock of current practice.

– Changing assessment an feedback practice, JISC, updated 2016
This guide offers many lessons learned and much good practice about how to approach large-scale change in assessment and feedback practice.